-Caveat Lector- From
http://www.newsday.com/news/printedition/ny-livit302803771jul30.column Bush a Scholar of the Absurd Paul Vitello July 30, 2002 In a high school auditorium, of all places, the president of the United States confirmed yesterday what some people have always said about his college years - which is that he spent them avoiding work. This is one way, anyway, to interpret his comments on a welfare reform bill now under consideration in Congress. The bill would let welfare recipients fulfill part of their work requirements by going to college. Here's what George W. Bush said about that yesterday while addressing a $1,000-a-plate fund-raising crowd gathered in a South Carolina high school gymnasium: "In the way they're kind of writing it right now out of the Senate Finance Committee, some people could spend their entire five years on welfare - there's a five-year work requirement - going to college. Now, that's not my view of helping people become independent, and it's certainly not my view of understanding the importance of work and helping people achieve the dignity necessary so they can live a free life, free from government control." That's what he said, and it is an interesting view of what college is all about. Never mind that it issues from the lips of our education president. A lot of Bush-bashers have already said this about him - that he didn't get much out of college; that he was a privileged boy who got into Yale on his name and wasted his time there in rather undignified pursuits. Describing college study as somehow antithetical to "helping people achieve ... dignity" would seem to confirm the view that Bush spent too much of his own time there cheerleading, binge-drinking and asking the old man for money. It is a perfect irony that the reauthorization of the 1996 "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act" comes up now, while public attention is focused on the frauds committed by corporate cheats on Wall Street and in the accounting world. For 20 years, the corporate culture that has increasingly dominated the national political agenda has stamped "cheat" on every sense of the word "welfare," like a scarlet letter. The war on "welfare cheats" has fueled the campaigns over the years of thousands of politicians, and many of those same politicians - not coincidentally - have championed the deregulation of business. Now, one of those politicians - the pro-business oil man, Enron friendly Bush - alludes to college-going welfare recipients as cheaters, too. But who's really been cheating whom? The Personal Responsibility Act, passed during the Clinton administration under the fuzzy rubric of "welfare reform," was in effect a federal annulment of its own responsibility for the poor. The act promised to help people for five years with federal grants to states. Then, it allowed the federal government to wash its hands of responsibility for people exceeding the limit. (In New York and many other states, beginning this year, that will shift the responsibility for helping poor people to state and local taxpayers. In Suffolk County, for example, they expect to lose all federal support for about 1,000 caseloads this year, according to a spokesman for the Department of Social Services.) In exchange for its support, the federal law required states to put welfare recipients to work for 30 hours a week. The original law permitted time spent in pursuit of education to count, up to a limited amount, toward that 30 hours. The new legislation favored by the Democrat- controlled Senate would expand that amount, while requiring 40 hours of work or school a week. Does "school-fare" work? Dennis Nowak, the Suffolk social services spokesman, said education for welfare recipients has been successful. In fact, he said, the more of it the better. "Our experience has been that it's better to let people enroll full time," he said, rather than limit the hours they can apply toward their work requirements. The department screens those who would rather go to school than take a workfare job as a clerk or a garbage collector - to make sure they are going to class and to make sure they "don't languish" there. In general, said Nowak, schooling offers better preparation than workfare jobs for people leaving the welfare roll. Seems logical, though it is not the president's view. "There are so many exceptions, so many loopholes, so many ways out of holding people to high standards," Bush told an invited audience at Charleston's West Ashley High School, referring to the proposed welfare reform bill that would allow people to attend college. It is hard to fathom his thinking. Or else, maybe he got his speeches mixed up. Maybe Bush was reading from the speech about his sieve-like corporate "reform" bill, which truly does have so many loopholes, so many ways out of holding people to high standards. Is that possible? Maybe, though the one thing a man like Bush would have learned in college is to keep his crib sheets straight. 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